Fortnite, the latest video game taking the world by storm, has been slammed for being and letting paedophiles target children. Meanwhile, video game addiction has been labelled a form of mental illness, and a UK government minister wants schools to ban mobile phones.
Anyone would be forgiven for thinking the biggest threats to children in the 21st century come from the digital world. Perhaps the scaremongers should take a deep breath and calm down.
There have been claims made for decades that video games promote violence, but there鈥檚 a . And Fortnite is not, in fact, a particularly violent example of the genre.
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True, it involves trying to kill other people in a Hunger Games type play-off, but the deaths are no more graphic than your average cartoon. Rather than being an addictive scourge, its soaring popularity is merely down to the fact that it can be played on smartphones, and for free.
Online risk?
The game also lets players talk to each other, . This does represent a potential source of risk, depending on the child鈥檚 age and maturity, but no more so than any of the hundreds of other video games with built-in voice chat.
In any case, children face many dangers in life. They are most likely to die from road accidents, but we don鈥檛 ban them from crossing the street 鈥� we show them how to do it safely. Parents need to teach all children, whether they play Fortnite or not, the basic safety rules of online interactions, such as not arranging to meet up with people they talk to online.
Part of the problem is that many parents are unfamiliar with these kinds of games, making them great fodder for media scare stories. But some groups that should know better aren鈥檛 helping 鈥� such as the World Health Organization, which recently added gaming addiction to its list of diseases.
That might sound alarming, but the move was controversial; some experts think it鈥檚 part of the ongoing trend to classify ordinary variation in human behaviour as mental illness. Lots of adults are devoted to their hobbies, and spend hours on them, sometimes to the detriment of other aspects of their lives. Are they all addicts too?
Smartphone ban
Now Matt Hancock, the UK鈥檚 digital minister, has , having previously . This kind of rhetoric might appeal to聽some voters, but it shows him up as out of touch with modern family life.
Most schools already ban phones from sight in classrooms but let children have a turned-off phone in their bag or locker. That鈥檚 for the very sensible reason that lots of children get themselves to school by walking or public transport and parents want them to have a phone for safety reasons.
It鈥檚 understandable that some people get antsy about children becoming devoted to activities that literally didn鈥檛 exist in their day. But it doesn鈥檛 help when those who should know better add to the moral panic.
